3 Keys to Personalizing Your Marketing

3 Keys to Personalizing Your Marketing

Since late 2007, I’ve invested more than 10,000 hours into our online and offline marketing strategies and systems with one simple goal: generating real estate leads and referral partners.

We have spent a lot of money, made a lot of mistakes, and learned many valuable lessons during this journey. My goal here is to provide a 30,000-foot view of the lessons I’ve learned during what feels like a 30,000-mile journey.

The most important thing I discovered is that the success or failure of your online marketing success has nothing to do with the specific technology you’re using. At its best, technology will help you to execute more efficiently and automate your existing marketing strategy. But tech tools are just a ticket to the game, not the game itself. They will not help an already broken or flawed marketing strategy. If anything, technology will accelerate the failure of a poorly thought-out plan.

So when you start to think about how to bring in more leads and referrals, remove technology from the equation. Instead, think about ways in which familiarity is achieved, trust is earned, and opportunities for personal connections are created.

The foundation of any successful marketing strategy is built on three components that can guide both your online and offline marketing efforts.

1. Presence

Making it easy for people to find you — and find out about you — is an important part of mastering the competency of presence. You have to be where your current and potential clients are.

These days, for the most part, they’re on the Web. That presents a new challenge: standing out in a setting where everyone can easily find anything they’re looking for in seconds, for free, by typing only a few keywords into a search engine. (I’ve written before about how to do this—check out this article for starters.)

Offline, having a presence is a reflection of your involvement in the community, your personal relationship with small businesses, and referrals or recommendations from those in the community who have worked with you in the past.

2. Relevance

This brings us to our second competency: relevance. This might be the most important one. The biggest challenge that businesses have marketing in today’s highly networked, always-on world of information is staying relevant. That requires you to provide value to your customer in a time and manner consistent with their expectations.

In a nutshell, you need to be unique, local, and timely to get noticed online. In a follow-up article to this one, we are going to dig deep into relevance and explore some great ways to stand out online and offline.

3. Diligence

Having systems in place or the discipline to follow up is the secret sauce to any effective marketing strategy. And you do this through diligence — constantly being ready to respond to communications from clients and prospects.

An example of an online system with built-in diligence is an IDX drip to home buyers who register on your Web site. But be careful: Simply having a drip campaign is of little value if you don’t keep tabs on your frequency of communication and the buyers’ changes to search criteria and make some effort to proactively offer value to them.

For instance, maybe you know of a listing coming up in your office that might meet their needs, or you’re able to recommend “like properties” in areas or price ranges that are less competitive than where they’re looking now.

Offline, diligence is your greatest weapon for building a personal, local presence in your community. The consistency and quality of your personal relationship investments will pay off, but it’s going to take time.

In the end, it comes down to having a plan. You’ve heard the old adage: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. I would add only one thing; it needs to be a good plan. These foundational competencies will lay the groundwork for a sound and profitable “mayorism” marketing strategy.

About the Author

Scott Schang is a branch manager at Broadview Mortgage’s Katella team in Orange, Calif. His approach to marketing has been to develop niche opportunities within specific demographics of online homebuyers. Schang’s expertise includes WordPress, content marketing, and online lead generation and conversion. Reach him at Scotts@BroadviewMortgage.com. Visit FindMyWayHome.com for more information.